The Electrical Experience

by Frank Moorhouse

  George noticed he wore riding-boots—from the city and he wore riding-boots.

  From the look and sound of it, Coffey was taking a brow beating.

  George joined them, standing hands on hips, eyes to the floor, listening to the Union Man with great impatience.

  ‘And you’ll pay them for their holidays,’ the Union Man said.

  George had always found this outrageous. Why should he pay for another man’s holiday?

  George butted in, ‘Every business has to arrange its own affairs.’

  ‘And who the hell are you?’

  George decided not to answer. The Union Man turned to Coffey and said, ‘Who is this person?’

  ‘This is George McDowell, a business friend.’

  ‘George McDowell—by god, I know about you—you run some sort of damn soft-drink factory down the coast—my god, yes, I’ve heard all about you. You keep your nose out of this, McDowell.’

  George was rather pleased that he was known, but did not have a clue for what reason he might be known.

  ‘I’m making this my business,’ George heard himself say.

  ‘Look, McDowell, go back down the coast and back to your rot-gut lolly-water.’

  In a second of fury George was about to say, ‘I’ll take you to court for saying that’, but remembered he was opposed to using the courts in man-to-man situations, and so, instead, he seized the Union Man by the scruff of the neck and seat of the trousers and tried to frog-march him out of the guest-house. They stumbled together into the slow sunlight of the afternoon.

  The Union Man freed himself with a twist, caught more by surprise than by George.

  Shouting at George, he said something about the Factory Act and being empowered and not to lay a finger.

  Coffey limped quickly down the steps, upset, restrained George, muttering, ‘Trouble enough.’

  George said, ‘You better not show yourself around my factory.’

  The Union Man said that was just what he intended doing and thanked him for the idea.

  They stood there in the street, opposed, and out of breath.

  ‘Please,’ Coffey said, holding George’s arm.

  Delighted to his heart that he’d thrown the Union Man off the premises but urged away by Coffey, George went off, leaving Coffey in his own mess. Coffey lacked stomach.

  George slapped his thigh with exhilaration as he went along the streets in no particular direction, reliving the incident.

  Finally he went to the California Café and had a soda with plenty of chipped ice.

  He said to Margoulis that freedom of enterprise, freedom to organise our own lives, would be finished if we let inspectors, city Union People and all the rest push us around.

  Margoulis appeared not quite comprehending, nevertheless agreed, and went on wiping the glasses left by the Saturday matinée interval.

  He took the opportunity to point out to Margoulis that with bottled drinks he wouldn’t have to wash up the glasses.

  But as a gesture of goodwill he admired Margoulis’s new soda fountain, refrigerated wells, goose-neck taps.

  Riding-boots.

  He’d like to see him try.

  The remark which hurt the most was the Union Man saying something about him living in the dark ages. For a go-ahead man, that hurt.

  Back in his room at Wychwoode, no sign of the Union Man, he lay on his bed in the late hot afternoon, hands behind his head, and drifted from exhilaration into miserableness.

  He had a thought about himself which made him miserable. It was this: I am a man held in my interlocking restraints; I am not free to enjoy the fruits of pleasure.

  Interlocking restraints.

  Sometimes his spirit cried out, wept, he wanted sometimes to be, just for one day, indolent. To say, drink alcohol, like some of the others. To lay down the burden. He could see nothing in gambling. But yet there must be something in it for men to pursue it so fanatically. That was just another pleasure he could not touch. He was locked in place. In the yoke. He feared the rules. He was frightened that relaxation was irreversible. That, once relaxed, the rules would not return to place. A slide would begin. Into what? What did he fear?

  Into insignificance.

  He did not want to be insignificant. That was his terror, his nightmare.

  Sin wasn’t a matter of hellfire for him. Sin was for him misdirected energy, if it was anything.

  He really didn’t know how to sin.

  He was swept with tearfulness, like a rain squall across the sea.

  He pulled himself together.

  Up again, he washed his face, wetted his hair, parted it, and went downstairs.

  The Union Man was definitely gone. Coffey was at golf. That dejected him. He played no sport himself. After throwing a stick to the dog for a while, he decided to go back a night earlier than planned.

  Packing the car, he jarred his thumb on the door. He could hardly bear it. He hopped about blowing warm air on his hand, damning and blasting and F-dashing. It hurt like the blazes. It was a bad sign, lack of inner co-ordination.

  Driving along with his aching thumb, on his way out of town he pulled up at the railway station, idling there and looking about for the Union Man.

  The Union Man was there. Riding-boots and all. George saw him from a distance. He was talking with the station-master. George switched off the ignition and went onto the platform. George then noticed something. He noticed that the Union Man was about his age. He’d really thought him older. And he noticed this also, he saw that the Union Man was clenching and unclenching his hand behind his back as he talked with the station-master.

  Why, thought George, this Union Man is a nervous sort.

  George watched from the platform entrance. No, I have nothing more to say, and went away without the Union Man seeing him.

  We are all shy, observed George wondrously, we are all shy people.

  Driving off, his thumb aching as he bumped along the bad mountain road, he admitted that he could not relax—too bad. Coffey at golf. He didn’t care. Every existence its own rules. A long drive ahead on the rough, dusty road. He didn’t mind that.

  He had one vice which he could not explain or put a word to, which made him sick to bring to mind. It intruded in his dreams. But he was still a young man, although considered old for his years, and he could and would overcome it. Expunge it.

  He had a flat at Fitzroy Falls and skinned his knuckle changing the wheel. He almost wept with the feeling of being so jangled, so rattled. It was the body turning on itself.

  Back on the dusty road down the mountain.

  A question kept coming to him. Who had, in all hell, made the telephone trunk call to the city. A trunk-line call.

  Whoever made the call had something in them. But it was still unforgivable—the bringing-in of outside people to handle town problems.

  That old buzzard Simon would never have talked on a telephone in his life, but he had a feeling it was him.

  For George, the weekend had pulled apart like a bad soldering job.

  Thelma expressed surprise at his early return and asked if he’d had a ‘nice time’.

  He said business was no picnic.

  He went to the bathroom, locked himself in to bathe his jarred thumb and skinned knuckles.

  Clarifying Muddy Water

  The water-supply from the local river was so muddy at times that it would not go through a filter. George found that to overcome this problem he agitated each barrel of water with two pounds of phosphate of lime and then allowed it to settle. Most of the impurities went to the bottom of the barrel within minutes. The water could then be filtered.

  One Drink That Did Not ‘Catch On’

  During the twenties George, in partnership with a local poultry farmer, tried to introduce a number of egg drinks. This is one, which together with the others, did not gain public acceptance.

  HOT EGG LEMONADE

  One egg, juice of one lemon, 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar. Beat the egg with the
lemon juice and sugar thoroughly. Mix while adding the hot water. Serve with grated nutmeg and cinnamon. The amount of lemon juice and sugar may be varied to taste. Serve hot.

  THE END OF ICE

  ‘We are but the engine-drivers of progress,’ T. George McDowell said, moving a paperweight as if by calculation, as if it were a driving-lever, a switch, a throttle.

  ‘Is friendship superseded?’

  ‘Ice and candles, Jim, ice and candles—’ balancing the two words—‘ice-making belongs with candles—and the one-horse shay, and red-flannel underwear.’

  Jim Tutman without spirit said that electric refrigeration in the homes would break down—people would die in their sleep from escaping gas. They would come back to the safety of ice. And, anyhow, many homes would not be able to afford electricity, ever.

  ‘No, Jim.’

  The unpleasant paradox for T. George was that he felt a love for ice. He had a great personal need for ice. He became unsettled when he was somewhere farther down the coast where ice was not available. He liked an ice-chilled soft drink. God bless the carbonated drink. Not only did he make ’em: he loved ’em. And sometimes on a hot day he would hold an ice-chip in his palm and look deep into the ice, into the slivers of trapped oxygen, and philosophise.

  Staring into the ice, he could not help but believe that there was another silent, possible world inside the ice. He was not talking divinity. He would not recognise a god if he saw one coming down the main street in an automobile. But ice did not destroy. It preserved. Nothing disintegrated, nothing decayed in ice. Therefore it was related to life, not death. There could, for instance, be a civilisation frozen under the North or South Poles. Bodies and cities frozen in ice. He thought maybe one day they would in fact freeze those who died. Awaiting the scientific means of restoring life. Whom to restore? With all due respect to the sanctity of life there were some people he would not wish to restore. He proposed those who had achieved success in their own lifetime.

  James Tutman was a borderline case.

  Jim should have changed over to the household electrical refrigerator business instead of doggedly going on making ice. Jim had made only a half-success of life. He had pioneered the ice business in this town, home delivery, ice-chests. But all that was finished.

  It was not that men hate progress, but that they love inertia.

  Man’s know-how was his personal capital. The bank inside the head. It was once said that it was wise to invest in know ledge because no man could steal it from you. No longer true.

  It was the closing of the bank doors for Jim. What he had learned in life was no longer valid currency.

  A man was nothing more than what he knew and what he could do. He had no time for people without vocation. Not that Tutman was one of these. He had vocation—was passionately, or had been, devoted to a craft. But Jim’s vocation was disappearing from the face of the earth.

  Jim Tutman, ‘refrigeration engineer’, one-time chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Rotarian, had once had the Premier of the State stay overnight in his home, had entertained Inventors and Aviators, and was, in fact, an Inventor himself, in small ways. Some in the town swore that Tutman had invented the block of ice. But this, of course, was not the case. Now here was Jim in his office, frowning, uncomfortable, had put on a tie, to seek a sustaining loan from him, T. George McDowell, a man his junior.

  T. George found this sad. That it was a compliment to his own acumen, he appreciated only in passing.

  T. George looked at Jim Tutman—at the sinews, warts, hairs, skin, bristles, freckles, pores, a face that had looked at and solved many problems—and as if by X-ray saw the white-bone skull with eyeless sockets.

  His hand perspired on the paperweight.

  Thought of the death-white skull made him queasy.

  ‘I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Jim, but I will,’ he said conclusively. ‘It’s time to modernise the mind. To modernise the mind.’

  There was silence.

  Then Tutman offensively, T. George felt, disregarded this advice and said, ‘You’re letting me go to bankruptcy?’

  T. George said nothing.

  ‘God in heaven, George, I helped you get your start in this town.’ Tutman stopped, having problems with words. Tutman was no speechmaker. Speechmaking, thought George, was the total person talking. Hands, face, mouth, body. Not like the letter or the telephone. Learn the first and last sentence—then you’ll begin well and end well.

  Tutman seemed to give up. The total person was talking all right. In Tutman’s every movement. Tutman said with bitterness, ‘You and your damned Rotary guff about the Brotherhood of Business.’

  ‘I repaid, Jim.’

  Tutman rose. The tension of his clutch had curled and creased the brim of his hat which he’d held in his hand throughout the talk. Tutman’s face was set with frustration. The photograph on the wall caught his eye and he pushed his chair away, going across to it, now jerking with anger, nodding with anger at it.

  It was a photograph of them both, smiling together, glasses held in toast, back in the twenties, at the installation of the Bratby syruping, filling and crowning machine. Tutman had helped. The rosy days of friendship and the allegiance of equals.

  Tutman tore the picture from its hook and, throwing it to the floor, stomped on it with his boot, shattering the glass, and probably, T. George couldn’t see, probably tearing the photograph.

  All motion causes friction.

  It all existed there in the broken glass and silence after Tutman left. T. George felt his thighs and backside moist on the chair. He stood up, pulling his sweaty trousers from his legs. A book, Increase Your Powers of Concentration, manifested itself from the other objects in the office and then dissolved back into the total whole. The detail and the whole. T. George became aware of them then. He had not philosophised about the detail and the whole. We know, he thought, that the whole contains infinite detail, detail beyond observation. We at times had to see the whole and not be led to the infinite detail where a man could lose himself for life. If detail manifested itself, it was to tell you something—something which would illuminate the whole.

  Yes.

  Now the broken photograph was gone and he saw only the still, total room—a blur of detail. Pull the switch—now only the broken photograph existed in his vision and the room was gone. Some men were detail workers who never saw a vision. Some men were visionaries who never got the job done.

  A Secret of Life: to conceive the vision; to pursue the vision, yet have the patience to supervise the detail.

  The Life Purpose of a business man is to get the produce of genius to the market-place for ordinary people.

  Move with the Times or be moved over by the Times.

  The job of the salesman is to convince people to improve their lives.

  The policeman’s widow. The policeman’s widow at the show dance had danced the tango with him and he had found his body excited by her to the point of embarrassment. She had known this and had purposely leaned against him, time and time again. Had rolled her stomach and thigh against his groin. Tantalising him. After one unfaithful occasion, shortly after, he had resolved never again to acknowledge her. His judgement subdued the roaring protest of his body. He never again acknowledged her, despite, at first, her puzzled, hurt smiles in the street. Her notes, calls, and entreaties.

  The only person he mentioned it to was Tutman, who told him to go ahead and enjoy himself. ‘It might soften you up, George.’

  He disregarded this advice.

  The flesh, the passions have no special rights or claims on the behaviour.

  Take the leverless fountain pen. The leverless fountain pen is an applaudable work of genius, but he had no doubts that it would be superseded. This was not because he could see anything wrong with the leverless fountain pen, or because he knew what would replace it. He knew it would be replaced because he believed in the implacable laws of progress. Perhaps an electrical pen which transmitted words the way the te
lephone transmitted voice? He put that only as a suggestion.

  To move with Progress one had to shake free of the clutching, bony hand of the past. Men always thought in terms of the past. Take himself. He had thought of an electrical ‘pen’. Why pen? Simply because the pen preceded. Look at refrigeration. At first thousands of pounds were spent trying to make a refrigerator which would freeze a block of ice in the top. Imitating the ice-chest. But the answer had been absorption refrigeration. Extracting the heat to make cold. Inventive men knew how to give the past the slip.

  When and why did a man lose the faculty of change? Was it some point in the dying of the mind and body. A hardening of the nervous system. He practised keeping his mind agile. Daily he made himself think thoughts he had not thought before. He forced himself to consider the worst. He practised considering the opposite. He tried always to imagine at least two other possible ways of doing something. He fed his mind with maxims and precepts—the how-to-do-it manual of the mind.

  The shattered photograph of those earlier, united days.

  Motion caused friction. It was the deepest mystery of life that this should be so. That change always hurt someone. Why the human race had to pay for its advancement. There were always rats in the cellar of life. It was a fact of mechanical life that without friction we could have perpetual motion.

  He picked up the fragments of glass. F-dash it. He picked up the damaged framed photograph and put it away in the bottom drawer of the desk. F-dash.

  Jim Tutman had been an experimenter, when he was a boy. George had shared the experiments with Tutman, transfixed with awe and anxiety.

  In those happier childhood days.

  Tutman had a ‘laboratory’. In a shed at the back of the house down the paddock. Stoppered bottles of chemicals. Liquids and powders of dangerous colours, blue-edged labels, the riveting words POISON and EXPLOSIVE. The invisible, floating presence of sulphur, ammonia, chlorine, and various oxides which pinched at the nostrils. Electrical batteries.